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Book review: What’s Mexico’s problem?

Samuel Brunk, Special to the Times
Published 10:05 a.m. MT Nov. 10, 2015

Difficult geography and a difficult neighbor have stunted Mexico's economy, border scholar Oscar J. Martínez writes in his new book

Border scholar Oscar J. Martínez has produced many classic works since the 1978 publication of his first book, “Border Boomtown,” a history of Ciudad Juárez.

“Mexico’s Uneven Development” (Routledge) is another important contribution to our understanding of Mexico and its complicated relationship with its neighbor to the north.

Martínez, regents professor of history at the University of Arizona, grew up in Juárez and El Paso in the 1950s. He opens his book with reflections on his personal perception of the differences in wealth between Juárez and El Paso during his youth. He adds that since then, when he has asked people in the area why they thought those differences existed, they have often blamed Juárez’s shortcomings on poor government, corruption or “cultural deficiencies” of Mexicans.

Martínez takes a decidedly different view. Rejecting such cultural arguments, he instead traces the different economic outcomes in Mexico and the United States to what he considers to be deeper “foundational factors.”

The first and most important among them is geography. The United States, he writes, is the world’s most favored nation geographically, with excellent ports, inland waterways and fertile soils. By contrast, Mexico has had many fewer “favorable spaces” for economic productivity, despite the oft-repeated perception of its abundant natural resources. Rainfall is scarce in much of the country, mountainous terrain cuts up the landscape and makes transportation difficult, rivers are generally not navigable, and, despite two long coastlines, ports leave much to be desired.

Martínez concedes that Mexico has geographical advantages over many nations — a recognition that other comparisons could have been highlighted — but the main comparison is with the United States. There, he writes, geography has helped produce more manageable population dynamics (another foundational factor), a better-integrated economy, and more effective urban networks than Mexico has enjoyed.

While placing a heavy explanatory burden on geography, though, Martínez does not go so far as to argue that it tells the whole story. For one thing, geographical advantages are not innate to the United States: The geography that nation has come to control is, after all, a conquered one, and some of it was taken from Mexico.

Another important foundational factor, therefore, is external relations, and here Martínez concludes that Mexico has often not benefited from its close proximity to the United States, despite the trade opportunities it has offered. Not only did the U.S. strip Mexico of territories that might eventually have supported greater economic development, but its powerful economy has also undermined Mexican industrialization and contributed mightily to Mexico’s economic instability.

Ultimately, while Martínez includes “the structure of production and governance” as a foundational factor, he contends that Mexican institutions and policies have been limited and weakened by geography and the constraints of foreign relations.

Martínez is surely correct that cultural stereotypes about Mexico do not explain the country’s economic shortcomings, but in addition to presenting this strong argument, the book also serves as a compendium of a great many facts about the history of the Mexican economy, and those facts could certainly be read somewhat differently than how he reads them.

The author’s descriptions of foundational factors are shot through with historical contingencies and policy decisions that Mexicans have had the power to make. The range of choices open to Mexican policymakers has indeed been much narrower than those available in the U.S., but different choices could have led to somewhat different results.

And, of course, the size of an economy is one thing, but the well-being of a nation’s citizens is another.

While Martínez argues convincingly that external relations have helped promote inequality within Mexico, he also suggests, in closing, that Mexican leaders might today take steps to create a more equitable society with less poverty. Ironically, in pursuing policies that have produced great inequality (one facet of “uneven development”), Mexican leaders and their counterparts in the United States have been, at least in recent decades, on the same page.

The author has given us much to think about, on this and many other issues.

Samuel Brunk chairs the department of history at the University of Texas at El Paso, where he studies the history of modern Mexico and the environmental history of the Chihuahuan Desert.